GlobalData forecasts the worldwide quantum computing market could be worth between $1bn and $5bn by 2025.
Japan’s Fujitsu and research institute Riken announced today (5 October) the release of a brand-new superconducting quantum computer from their collaboration centre.
From today (5 Oct), companies and researchers conducting research with Fujitsu and Riken will have access to the new quantum computer.
Fujitsu’s new computing platform enables the easy comparison of calculation results between previous quantum computers and quantum simulators, which digitally recreate quantum computing on classical computers.
Whilst quantum computers have been in development since the late 1990s, producing consistent and reliable results via quantum computing remains a massive challenge to developers.
Fujitsu acknowledged in its announcement that the creation of a quantum computer that consistently produces reliable results could take another decade, however Fujitsu was optimistic that its new platform could help progress on this challenge.
Fujitsu and Riken’s announcement comes just as mentions of quantum computing are steadily slowing down within company filings.
Mentions of the topic also never reached the levels of interest that either Cloud or Artificial Intelligence have reached, despite peaking in April 2022 at 426 mentions.
This lack of interest in quantum could be for several reasons.
Firstly, there has been a distinct lack obvious use cases for businesses in quantum computing which can make the technology seem a bad investment especially when Fujitsu and Riken themselves concede that reliable quantum computing could still be decades away.
Research analyst GlobalData states that there is currently no clear line-of-sight to commercial scale quantum computing.
Despite this, the analyst still forecasts that the global market of quantum computing could be worth around $1bn to $5bn by 2025. However, any estimates about the value of quantum computing is likely to be left to educated guesses given the nature of the technology’s unpredictable breakthroughs.
In a recent industry update written 2 October, GlobalData analyst Steven Schuchart stated that quantum computing was “still going strong, even if the spotlight has moved to AI”.
However, rather than seeing these two themes in opposition, Schuchart stated that quantum computing has the potential to benefit future AI developments and considers the breakthroughs in quantum computing too valuable to lose current investment, even if they may seem far away.
The overall sentiment towards quantum computing in 2023, writes Schuchart, has been “holding steady at cautious hope”. Whilst the theme may be seeing a decline in the amount of news coverage or filings, Schuchart remains optimistic that the technology will continue to see investment and will still have potential benefits to AI and beyond.
Fujitsu will continue its research partnership in quantum computing R&D with Riken, stating it has plans to work towards a computing workload broker.
